Converting Quarterly title
The Official
Technical Magazine
of AIMCAL
small AIMCAL logo
  Search

Vacuum Web Coating

Blogmaster: Dr. Charles A. Bishop

25 Latest Articles Current Articles | Archives | Search

Process

14

Sputtering gold with high target utilisation

Posted by Charles Bishop on November 14, 2011
There have been a number of presentations that have focused on the magnetron sputtering design as a method of obtaining a high target utilisation. Ideally, we would all like to have high target utilisation, but often we will trade this off against improved coating uniformity or higher deposition rat...

[Read the rest of this article...]

Posted in: Process
Actions: E-mail | Permalink | Comments (0) RSS comment feed | del.icio.us
25

Sputter-deposition rates

Posted by Charles Bishop on August 25, 2011
I needed to find the sputter-deposition rate for a few materials.  This sounded a simple task but it was not as easy as I thought. First, there are many different ‘rates’ quoted.  Some are a just a thickness per unit time others include the power applied and expressed as a dyna...

[Read the rest of this article...]

Posted in: Process
Actions: E-mail | Permalink | Comments (6) RSS comment feed | del.icio.us
31

Heat load onto substrates

Posted by Charles Bishop on May 31, 2011
In the course of developing a model of a simple vacuum-deposition process, it is interesting to look at some of the sensitivities of the deposition process. Anything that has an effect on the process will ideally be controlled and wherever possible minimized.  In metallizing, I realized that ...

[Read the rest of this article...]

Posted in: Process
Actions: E-mail | Permalink | Comments (0) RSS comment feed | del.icio.us
10

High-Power Impulse Magnetron Sputtering (HiPIMS) - what use is it?

Posted by Charles Bishop on May 10, 2011
Another of the topics that attracted several papers at the recent SVC Conference was that of HiPIMS. This has been a regular topic for research for a number of years and more recently has seen an interest in evaluating it for roll-to-roll processing. I must confess that I have been left with the imp...

[Read the rest of this article...]

Posted in: Process
Actions: E-mail | Permalink | Comments (1) RSS comment feed | del.icio.us
03

Atomic Layer Deposition - roll-to-roll ALD coming soon

Posted by Charles Bishop on May 3, 2011
  Looking back at the recent Society of Vacuum Coaters Annual Technical Conference I think that the most interesting set of papers that I listened to were all about atomic layer deposition.  This technology has been around for many years but has generally been used on rigid substrates only...

[Read the rest of this article...]

Posted in: Process
Actions: E-mail | Permalink | Comments (0) RSS comment feed | del.icio.us
15

Roll-to-roll coating – the answer to everything or is it?

Posted by Charles Bishop on March 15, 2011
There is a trend towards roll-to-roll coating for many electronic devices such as displays and photovoltaics.  The reasoning is that moving to roll-to-roll manufacturing will be a route to reducing costs.  The worry is that not everybody making the decisions fully understands what they are...

[Read the rest of this article...]

Posted in: Process
Actions: E-mail | Permalink | Comments (0) RSS comment feed | del.icio.us
28

Questions about process consistency

Posted by Charles Bishop on October 28, 2010
Working on a project of metallized poly, I had few observations and wanted your opinion. Q1) Poly film shows strange behaviour in terms of treatment,before metallization the film had 44+ treatment, after metallizing in some cases it dropped below 34 while in some cases it retained 44+. What could b...

[Read the rest of this article...]

Posted in: Process
Actions: E-mail | Permalink | Comments (2) RSS comment feed | del.icio.us
14

Free span and deposition drum combined

Posted by Charles Bishop on October 14, 2010
Free-span deposition has always had the advantage that the deposition can be done across the whole web to the very edge.  This means that the metallized web may not have to be slit to remove any unmetallized edges.  The down side of this process is that there is no substrate cooling and so...

[Read the rest of this article...]

Posted in: Process
Actions: E-mail | Permalink | Comments (1) RSS comment feed | del.icio.us
23

Making changes – think carefully first!

Posted by Charles Bishop on September 23, 2010
It is very easy to make changes to the vacuum deposition process but the results of the changes may well be different than what we expected.  The reason for this is that we are changing more things than just the one parameter we changed.  Sometimes these additional changes are hidden chang...

[Read the rest of this article...]

Posted in: Process
Actions: E-mail | Permalink | Comments (0) RSS comment feed | del.icio.us
18

Oil and vacuum systems

Posted by Charles Bishop on July 18, 2010
As there are a number of moving parts inside any roll to roll vacuum coater it is important that bearings are lubricated. Similarly of you are using rotary vane and diffusion pumps an essential part of the pumping system is the oil.  However from the standpoint of adhesion of any coating oil is...

[Read the rest of this article...]

Posted in: Process, Pumping, System issues
Actions: E-mail | Permalink | Comments (0) RSS comment feed | del.icio.us

Blogmaster

Charles Bishop photo

Dr. Charles A. Bishop

Charles is a toolmaker by trade after completing a mechanical engineering apprenticeship. He then entered University and obtained a Bachelors degree in materials engineering with a Diploma in Industrial Studies. During his final year he first started work on vacuum based research, helping develop a process for manufacturing titanium based bone implants for tendon location. He went on to obtain a Masters degree and Doctorate following further research into vacuum deposition processes. During this time and as a postgraduate he also worked as a consultant.

Charles next spent time in industry working for various divisions of ICI including polyesters, nylon, Imagedata, Flex Products Inc., and explosives as well as contributing to other projects. In 1998 he took the opportunity to return to consultancy work and set up his own company.

Charles has more than 30 years experience in vacuum deposition mainly onto flexible webs. He has regularly contributed papers to conferences and recently has edited this blog on behalf of AIMCAL as well as being one of their presenters for various webinars and the more formal Converting School courses.

Charles has also published 2 books, Vacuum deposition onto webs, films and foils and Roll-to-roll vacuum deposition of barrier coatings.